


Of Fire Born and Bred

by Copperonthetongue



Category: God of War (Video Games)
Genre: Bad Parenting, Fatherhood, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Kratos trying hard to Dad, Oaths & Vows, Parent Kratos (God of War), still not great at it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 08:32:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17076905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Copperonthetongue/pseuds/Copperonthetongue
Summary: Set post-game; Kratos can't sleep, so he watches Atreus instead.





	Of Fire Born and Bred

**Author's Note:**

> My attempt at Angry Spartan Dad, comments are love. <3

Kratos sits sleepless once more by the smoldering embers of the hearth fire. The hour is late but rgardless of his weariness he knows better than to chase Morpheus, it is one battle he knows he will not win and so he chooses instead to keep his place by the hearth, sitting in silence and watching his son find the peaceful slumber Kratos himself cannot. 

The fire pops loudly, sending a shower of gleaming sparks up into the air and for a moment Kratos wonders if the sound will wake the boy, but Atreus only rolls over restlessly in his sleep. He looks so much like his mother in that moment that it makes the raw, still bleeding wound inside of the older man ache anew. 

Once, perhaps Kratos might have called that feeling heartache but it cannot be heartache that pains him now so terribly, for Kratos has no heart left to do the aching. Faye had stolen it away long ago and despite his grumbling to the contrary Kratos had never been so grateful for an act of theft in all his life.

 

Even now, all those many years and a child later Kratos still cannot fathom why his wife would have wanted it in the first place, but he is grateful that she had.

 

It had been a withered, unwholesome thing for years before he’d met her, tattered and rotted with hate and fury and bitterness. Kratos, in hindsight is forced to admit to himself that he had been more beast than man, then, regardless of how he might have seen himself at the time. 

That endless river of hate that burned inside him had been the only thing keeping him alive. Spite had done what nothing else could have, it made him go on when he would have rather sought the peace of the grave, but that was what it seemed the world and all those in it had wanted and Kratos, ever contrary, had refused to give them the satisfaction. 

 

No, his heart was nothing anyone sane would wanted and yet somehow Faye had, she’d coveted it like a dragon covets gold and to Kratos’ baffled wonder she’d stolen it away before Kratos himself had even realized she wanted it, much less what she intended to do with it once she had it

Even if she’d told him he probably wouldn’t have believed her.

Faye had somehow taken the misshapen, broken thing in those strong and endlessly capable hands of hers and just as with everything else she touched it had been made better by the doing.

Kratos would not have believed such a thing was possible until he saw it with his own eyes and once it was in her possession she’d guarded it more zealously than any dragon ever had its hoard, to Faye, the pitiful remains of Kratos’ heart had been a treasure worth having.

If he closes his eyes he can still catch the faint echos of his wife’s perfume, can imagine that she is still there, that she has not left him alone with a child he has no idea how to raise, in a world he is almost entirely unfamiliar with. 

Faye and her quiet strength and endless forgiveness had made Kratos as close to whole as he could ever be again after everything he’d seen, after all the terrible things he’d done, and without her he felt…lost. It was not a sensation he enjoyed. 

Kratos was certain that it could not possibly be heartache that plagued him now, that robbed him of his sleep because he knew that what little remained of it had burnt to ash only weeks before, wrapped in cloth of her own weaving and covered in wildflowers that their son had picked for her with his own small hands.

All that remains now sleeps the sleep of the innocent before Kratos’s weary eyes. 

 

Atreus is all he has left, and there is nothing Kratos will not do to protect him. Nothing at all. There is no journey he will not make, no price he will not pay, he will let all the worlds that ever were or ever will be burn to ash and dust before he allows harm to come to the child Faye entrusted to his care.

 

In the close dark and silence of their home Kratos studies the boy’s sleeping face and he knows in the depths of his soul that there is no crime he will not commit, no journey he will not undertake and no sacrifice he would not be willing to make if it meant keeping his son, Laufey’s son, safe and whole. 

Kratos will kill every God in this land if he must, Odin and Thor and all his sons, and Freya too if she pushes him, for while he may like the witch well enough, he will not allow that to stay his hand if she dares to direct her fury at his child.

 

Atreus is the only thing in all the worlds that Kratos loves and in that, he and Freya have a great deal in common. 

 

He knows her pain, oh yes… all too well does he know it and Kratos also knows the lengths to which Freya will be willing to go to slake her fury and grief at Baldur’s death. He cannot blame her for it. Monster he may have been, but Baldur was Freya’s child. He’d been born of her womb, nursed at her breast. There was no deeper bond than that, not for any mother worth the name.

While Kratos knows that he will never truly understand the darkest depths of Freya’s grief, it is familiar all the same. He may not be a mother, but he is a father and had he not rent his own world asunder to avenge his losses? 

He had slain gods and monsters to repay them for the loss of his family and he had been only a mortal man then and all that he had done, he had done to slake his own pain because he’d believed that he had nothing left to lose. 

Baldur was all Freya had left in her exile, and now Baldur was dead.

Freya was a goddess born and Kratos had snapped her only son’s neck before her very eyes as she pled for his life, for a mercy that Kratos had chosen not to grant. Kratos had taken from her the one thing she treasured above all else, her only child. Her son. 

That cannot be forgiven, and Kratos knows in his bones that one day very soon there will be a reckoning for his choice, but regardless of what may come…. he cannot find it in himself to begrudge the goddess her vengeance. So long as she confines it to Kratos himself, that is. 

 

Freya was Baldur’s mother and no matter how cruel, how twisted and evil Baldur became, no matter how much damage he did or what crimes he committed against others the fact remained that he would forever and always be her little boy.

It is a sentiment that Kratos understands and one that as a father, he shares. 

 

Freya had suckled Baldur at her own breast, had carried him in her womb, and with the coin of her suffering she’d brought him into the world, paying for his life with her own blood, sweat and agony. Birth is a gamble for any woman, even a goddess. 

Freya would have died for her son, and as Kratos had looked down into Baldur’s mad blue eyes he knew then just as he knows now that Freya would have forgiven him any transgression. 

That perfect, selfless love was why Kratos had no choice but to kill him.

If Kratos had let Baldur live, first he would have killed Freya and once he was finished with his mother he would have turned his fury on Kratos and Atreus once more. 

Even if they’d fled, managed somehow to escape before Baldur could gather himself for another assault Kratos knew that the younger God would never have stopped hunting them…and not only because Odin commanded it.

 

Kratos had shamed Baldur with defeat, there was no forgiving that for a man like Baldur had been.

 

Kratos was older, wiser in some ways and he had long ago learned better than to leave an enemy at his back, because while he had bested Baldur this time, that was no promise he would do the same the next. This battle he had won, but if he lost the next it would not be Kratos that paid the price, it would be Atreus.

 

There is a singular truth that all warriors know, in Sparta that lesson is taught early. You can best a man a hundred times…. but one bad day is all it takes to turn victory into defeat. There are a hundred ways it can happen and Kratos is unfortunately well acquainted with them all. 

In battle, one moment of hesitation, even the briefest loss of focus can mean the difference between life and death. Even the greatest of warriors can make a mistake. Kratos might have let Baldur live if it had only been his own life at stake, but it wasn’t. It was Atreus’ life he could not risk.

No matter how he sympathized with Freya’s plight allowing Baldur to live was a chance that Kratos could not take… and so he had to die. A dead man wins no battles, causes no suffering and by slaying him Kratos had made absolutely certain that the mad bastard would never lay his filthy hands on his boy again. 

 

Freya’s tears meant nothing against Atreus’ life.

Come what may from that choice, Kratos regrets nothing and he will accept the price of his decison when the time comes but Baldur will still be dead and no amount of vengeance will change that…and that is all that matters to Kratos in the end.

As he watches Atreus sleep, Kratos is slowly filled with a sense of helpless dread. Their time together is running short and he knows it, somehow he can feel it ….like a storm brewing in the distance, a storm that he knows he cannot outrun.

The fate painted so clearly on that wall in Jotunheim is fast approaching and Kratos is well aware that there is nothing he can do to stop it. Not even if he wanted to, which he is not entirely certain that he does. 

The truth of the matter is that he has lived a very, very long time, far longer than he ever dreamed possible when his journey began in Sparta all those long years ago and while Kratos does not age physically as a mortal would .…he is not untouched by the hands of time. Kratos feels old, old and tired and worn thin by a lifetime of suffering and strife.

Death is not a thing Kratos fears for himself, but the thought of leaving Atreus alone and defenseless, surrounded by enemies while he’s still so terribly young chills Kratos to the bone. That terrible possibility is the only thing that has ever frightened Kratos. Atreus is not not ready to face the world alone, but he MUST be…and so Kratos drives the boy harder than he should.

 

Kratos would gladly have Atreus hate him, if it meant that he would live to do so.

 

Kratos has done only one truly good thing in all his misbegotten life, and that is fathering the child now scowling in his sleep at some dream Kratos cannot see, and as he watches the boy in the firelight Kratos allows himself a faint smile. 

Atreus reminds him of Faye so often that that at times it seems to Kratos as if he were her shade, but every now and again Kratos finds himself abruptly and forcefully reminded that however much of his mother the boy has in him, there is an equal amount of Kratos himself there as well,…that is if one knows where to look. 

 

That is his own scowl on that sleeping face, and his hot temper that goads the boy to rashness in battle. Kratos finds himself in the sharp prow of the child’s nose and in his maddening stubbornness. He has a great deal of sympathy for his own mother, now…if he was anything like Atreus as a child.

 

However it is the boy’s eyes that please Kratos most. Atreus’ eyes are blue and although Kratos knows the boy believes that he got them from his mother, the truth is that they came from Kratos. 

Faye’s eyes had been a more stormy shade of blue, often times more gray than blue at all, especially when she was in a temper. Atreus’ eyes are a blue so vivid that it shames the sea itself. Kratos would know them anywhere, even after all these years.

 

Those are Kratos’ mother’s eyes staring out of that little face, fathomless and as blue as the Aegean sea that Kratos know he will never see again in this life. He’d never thought he would see his mother’s eyes again either, outside of dream and faded memory that was… but when Atreus had opened his eyes for the very first time there they were, wide and blue and perfect. When Kratos looks at them, it feels as if home is not so very far away after all.

His mother’s eyes are the only thing Kratos can truly remember about the woman who bore him, he’d been too young when they were parted to truly recall her face or her manner and by the time his training was complete she’d already died and Kratos had never been able to bid her farewell but now every time he looks into his sons eyes he can see her there, reaching out to him across the ages…gone but never forgotten. 

 

Not so long as Atreus lives. 

 

The boy will live, Kratos vows that he will make it so if it is the last thing he ever does in this life. He swore it once already to Laufey as she lay dying, and he swears it again now as he watches the fire in their hearth and listens to the soft wheeze of their son’s breath. 

 

Atreus will endure, Kratos will make it so and if Odin and his foolish son are unwise enough to test Kratos’ mettle, well then,…he has a great deal of practice at killing Gods and he will be happy to add them to the list of those he has already slain.


End file.
